


The Conqueror

by Illyria_Lives



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Gen, It's midnight I am not responsible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-10
Updated: 2014-04-10
Packaged: 2018-01-18 20:55:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1442524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Illyria_Lives/pseuds/Illyria_Lives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Cassandra Pentaghast saw Teo Trevelyan, he was burning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Conqueror

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd, written all in one go because I'm a masochistic bastard with no sense of self preservation and a weird want to publish this even though it's all rather trite. It's midnight.
> 
> UPDATE: Now that we know Sera's orientation, I apologize for her misrepresentation in this fic, which was written before I had knowledge of it. Her presence in this fic is not meant as erasure and I apologize as it would be more difficult for me to replace her with another female.

The first time Cassandra Pentaghast saw Teo Trevelyan, he was burning.

The sands of the Waste were hot beneath her armored boots, and the sun reflected off the dunes at the right angle to blind.  The sun, great and yellow and white with heat, crested over a tall dune, and the man silhouetted against it, rising battered from the dunes, was alight with a halo of a sun rising on a world already on fire.  Green danced in the sky, and Cassandra could taste magic in the air, moving through her lungs.

Her scouting party came across the lone man as they mounted the dune, and he looked down at them, face in shadow, skin torn and burned by the sun, his armor hanging off of him. When Cassandra was close enough, she saw his face, plain, burned and scarred, and his eyes.  Steel gray.  Looking at her.  Something was off.

“Seeker,” he identified her by her armor, black and white and staring back at him with one large Andrastian eye.  Orlesian, by his accent.  “I have a report.”

Then, she looked, really _looked¸_ in his eyes.  They burned, swimming with green phosphor and shadows.  Power welled up in them, and even as Cassandra was calling for the Lord Seeker he fell into the sand.

~

Teo Trevelyan was a soldier.

With his wounds patched and his eyes dulled back to their normal gray, he sat up straight and eyed Leliana as he told her of his platoon in even, mechanical tones.  All dead.  The sky ripping itself open.  How he had plunged one hand into the abyss and had _squeezed_ it like a throat, like a living thing, until it died and closed.  He opened and closed his hands, lighting them afire with something far more wild and far more ancient than magic.  He was no mage.  Just a soldier.

Leliana named him.  Inquisitor.  Cassandra thought the title too much for an unproven man with unknown sympathies, but her hands were tied and her course was decided.  Guiding him, representing the Seekers of Truth as he worked to sew the rags of the world back together.  He alone held the power.

He called her ‘Seeker’.  Occasionally, as they made their way to Skyhold, he would address her as ‘Pentaghast’ as he called the dwarf travelling with her and the other Seekers ‘Tethras’.  It was at the same time demanding and impersonal, but it spoke of a life spent on the road with men-at-arms, calling each other _brother_ as gruffly as they could.

She called him, in a vie for equal footing, by his last name and title as well.  Inquisitor.  Trevelyan.  He seemed to find it lightly amusing, if not slightly annoying.  He was unshakable.  A man of the slums, of the twin blades he carried on his back, of power in one clenched fist.  She underestimated his abilities until she saw the truth of them herself.

They were set upon by bandits on one road.  The final kill was his, as he held the bandit leader twisted in his arms, a blade at his throat.

“Tell me,” the Inquisitor ordered, mouth close to his ear, “what you know.  What you _saw_.”

Answers given.  Smuggler routes, Orlesian armies moving.  Dalish elves amassing.

“Please,” the bandit said, and Cassandra watched him relax as Trevelyan pulled the edge of the blade away from his skin.

The sound his neck made when it was broken, a quick twist, rang through the mostly silent road.

Trevelyan stepped over the body, and his eyes were like blades.

~

He gathered soldiers of his old armies, and many others.  An apostate dreamer who took to taking up Trevelyan’s hands in his own, feeling the energy there and soothing it over when the man would complain of it cramping his fingers.  The glittering Enchanter of the Empire, who looked at him like a cat looks at a particularly attractive songbird within reach of claws.  The towering Qunari mercenary and his rebel band.  A blond elf with a body like a bowstring.  He was a magnet wrapped in dark leathers, who knew when to extend a hand and when to strike.

If he ever caught on to how she may have questioned some of his companions, he made no acknowledgement of it.  He let her be wary, be ready in case one of them betrayed him, edging around the apostates and the unknown rogues, watching over her shoulder for the invisible young man the Inquisitor claimed to have on his side.  The days and weeks were cold and bloody as the Inquisition tore first a small sliver, and then a wedge, and then a swathe of Orlais beneath its heel.  Cassandra, first shocked and awed by how Trevelyan would wrestle with the Fade itself to close the Tears, became used to the screams and the sounds of the sky rending and moving.  All she would have to worry about afterwards was the hollowness of his eyes and the way his hands shook.

Saving the world was killing him.

~

Skyhold was filled with books.

When there were no battles to fight, and training was verging on self-harm, too many hours spent holding a sword against a wooden dummy, Cassandra took to the libraries to read.  War strategies.  Histories.  A well-hidden copy of _Hard in Hightown 2_.  Varric, surprisingly enough, tended to keep away from the printed word, instead hanging around the barracks or the market square, telling a tale of how Trevelyan the Terrible and Mighty left no survivors in his attack on the Templar Stronghold (untrue, as the blond man with the haunted eyes attested to, sitting by Varric’s side, still in his reds.  Cassandra did not recognize his face, but knew his name.  Cullen).

In the library, Cassandra expected to be alone.  She was wrong.

Her relationship with the Inquisitor did not stray past politeness.  They worked towards the same goal, fought side by side.  He trusted her, and she trusted him, if it was the way a man trusted a trained wolfdog.  It was still a wolf, beneath the collar.

The Inquisitor, sometimes wolf, sometimes man, sat at a table in the library, bent over a book, lips moving softly and quietly as he read, slowly.  She considered leaving him to whatever it was he was treating himself to, but, after a moment’s contemplation—perhaps not _enough_ contemplation, she later thought—she took up her own Historie of Armaments and joined him at the table.

He barely glanced up at her as she sat down and read, quietly.  Some time passed.

“I keep waiting for you to interrupt me,” he noted, and she rather liked how impressed he sounded.

“I understand the want for solitude and silence,” she replied.

“Indeed,” he said, and she glanced up from her book to see him looking at her.  “It is not something I’m used to.  At least not in this,” he waved a hand around the intricate maze of shelves and tomes, “environment.”

“A library?” she asked, thinking that he perhaps had his teachings from the small collection of books Chantries kept for teaching and the succor of their worshippers.

His mouth smiled, but his eyes were serious.  “Would you think less of me if I told I only recently learned to read?” he asked, as an answer.

He raised one eyebrow while she struggled to find her words.  “No,” she finally said.  “I am just… surprised.”  To say the least.  The man spoke bluntly, but with an intelligence to his words that she had only assumed came from formal teachings.

“Very few books get thrown out, into the gutter,” he said.  “And it’s rather difficult to pickpocket a book from someone.”

“I did not mean any disrespect,” she cut in.

“I wasn’t implying that I was insulted,” he said.  “You just seem less likely to coddle me for knowing.”  He began to lift his book up from the table, to show her the cover, and then hesitated before speaking, “and secrets are a heavy thing.”  He showed her the early primer he had been studying.  Something she would have read when she was ten years old in Nevarra, in her grandfather’s old mansion.  He was handing her sharp information.  A weapon.  And he was trusting her not to wield it against him.

He was watching her with iron eyes, tallying her response.

She shrugged.  “You are a good man.  A good warrior.  It does not matter to me how well you read, so long as you do your duty.”

He smiled at that.  Well and truly smiled.  And went back to his reading.

After a while longer, Cassandra left with some excuse about meeting their local Grey Warden for some swordplay practice.  It was hard to focus on reading, anyway.

Especially as he moved his mouth while he read.

~

Teo Trevelyan was a poor man, born poor and raised poor.  This made him many enemies.

When the Duke de Brevin called for a truce between their warring parties (no doubt a scheme to achieve more power himself), Trevelyan agreed to allow the man into Skyhold.  Cassandra was against it.  He would be able to see their defenses, walk their hallways, taking in information.

“Not your call, Seeker,” the Inquisitor told her, in a voice that beckoned for no argument.

“Gaspard is a snake,” Vivienne added, for once agreeing with Cassandra.  “He is a master of the Game.  He will find some way to outwit you.”  She and the Inquisitor rarely saw eye to eye, and it was a familiar flash of animosity that flashed between them after her comment.

“I have never been on a noble hunt,” he said crisply, “but I can tell the prey from the hunters.”  It was cryptic.  Just like him.  He settled down at the desk in the war room, ready to receive his visitor.  Vivienne, in a huff, left him to “his sinking ship.”

When Gaspard entered, unarmed and without guard, as per his instructions, Trevelyan did not stand, did not even look up from where he peered at his desk, head propped on his hands.  As clever and defiant an opening volley as Cassandra was like to see, standing at attention towards one wall.  Varric sat in another corner, watching the exchange with storyteller’s eyes.

Only when Gaspard had steamed for a moment, unnoticed, did he deign to make a noise to get Trevelyan’s attention.

The Inquisitor looked up and allowed Duke Gaspard a small smile that Cassandra knew immediately was false; it was nearly mechanical, the tightening of correct muscles all in sync.  He gestured with one hand towards the chess board already set up in a campaign, on the table between them.

"Before we get to the real depth of the conversation," he said in a genteel tone, skipping all opening dialogue, "If you could help me with a riddle that I have been thinking over for some time now."

"Oh?" Gaspard smiled as well, but Cassandra knew him too well to think it genuine.  "I am always happy to help, Inquisitor."  A prime player of the Game, indeed.  Poisoned words, double meanings.  You stupid man, allow highborn me to assist you.

Trevelyan's smile grew a bit thin.  "Well, the riddle is thus: if you play chess with a dragon, and he sets up the board as such, what one move will beat him?"

Gaspard looked at the board; Cassandra did so as well.  It was an obvious solution.  Gaspard grew rather smug, and Cassandra winced a bit.  No doubt the Duke was thinking what a fool the Inquisitor was, born in the slums and unable to find a solution.

"Well, you would move--" he reached out a hand for the board, and Trevelyan, with fearful calm, stood and in one smooth motion brought a dagger out of his sleeve and into his hand, and drove the wicked spike of steel into Duke Gaspard's outstretched hand, pinning it to the chessboard.  The Duke screamed, and Trevelyan gave the knife a cruel twist.  Blood leaked onto the chessboard and flowed among the pieces, all heavy carved stone that had not moved with the impact of the hand into the center of the board.

The Inquisitor kept one hand on the blade and circled around the table so to better lean into Gaspard's ear, one sharp-armored hand clasping the back of his neck to keep him in line as the nobleman stared at his injured hand.

"When you play games with a dragon," The Inquisitor hissed.  "You get  _burned._  I have walked the other side, Duke.  All the hills and valleys you walk when sleeping.  I have seen it for what it truly is, while you are blind.  Half of the world is burning, begging to kneel, and still you insist on  _fucking_ with me."

Gaspard sucked in a painful breath, locked body-to-body with Trevelyan.  "Inquisitor, I--"

Smartly, Trevelyan twisted the knife, and Gaspard's weak scream was muted by how he slammed his mouth shut.  A proud man, refusing to show how in pain he was.  Trevelyan, Cassandra predicted, would not like that.

His hard, flinty eyes narrowed, and the Inquisitor put his mouth close to Gaspard's ear.  It was a good tactic of his, that he used with close kills and attacks, gathering information from captured bandits--his entire body, not large or overly muscular, but feral, in their space, pressing against them, reminding them how small they were and just how much power he had, pinning their arms to their sides and angling one of his blades into their throat.  I hold your life in my hands, the curve of his back said.  There is nothing but you, me, and death.  Gaspard was a chevalier, but this was _power_.

The Inquisitor tilted his head at the silence, looking closely at Gaspard’s masked face.  Then, he took his hand from the back of his neck and almost delicately removed Gaspard’s mask, fingers brushing through hair and undoing knotted ribbon, laying it on the table. 

“You are a learned man, Duke de Brevin,” Trevelyan said, closing in on Gaspard once more, “you surely see the answer to this riddle.”

Gaspard’s eyes were nervous and fevered.  “Inquisitor?” he asked.  His voice was low.

“We are not _playing_ any longer.  The Game, as you Orlesian bastards of the nobility call it, ends today.”  He reversed his casual hold of the dagger, fingers tightening on it, and with a final torturous twist, pulled it from Gaspard’s hand and drove it into the shaped nose of his mask.  The delicate layers of paper-mache cracking beneath the bloodied steel and pinned to the wood of the table.

Gaspard took his hand back, cradling it to his chest as it bled.  His breath was ragged.  “and you…” he muttered, probably for the first time in his life not calculating his words.  “You claim to be Orlesian…”

Trevelyan, back behind the desk, spread his arms wide.  “I like to think that any female dog would hesitate to call itself a mongrel bitch,” he said.  “I am, first and foremost, the leader of the Inquisition.  Then, a soldier.  Then I am a heretic.  Then a knife-wielder, then a drunkard, then a slumlord, then a mongrel peasant.  I would continue to list my own labels but we would not encounter ‘Orlesian’ until very late in the list, and you really cannot afford to have your wound go unhealed for much longer.”  Trevelyan nodded towards the door.  “Your exit awaits, chevalier.”

The Duke, breathing hard, eyes wild, turned on his heel and headed to the great eye-marked door.  But as he reached it, the Inquisitor called out again.  “Oh, and Brevin…” when the nobleman’s eyes were on him, Trevelyan moved the proper chess piece across the board.  “Checkmate.”

“You’d been thinking of that for a few days now, hm?” Varric asked when they were alone again.  “Classy.  Dramatic.  Pompous, even.”

“Get someone to clean this off,” Trevelyan ignored the dwarf and gestured towards the mess of blood on the table.  He pulled his knife free of the wood and checked its edge for nicks before re-sheathing it on his wrist.  Then he looked at Cassandra, with those slate-gray eyes that pinned her without any real effort.  “Seeker,” he said, a mix of simple acknowledgement and familiar greeting, and brushed past her on his way out.

~

He was not a foolish man, and she was not a foolish woman.  Cassandra watched the battle critically, and noted that in the next minute the enemy archer, if not dispatched by Varric, was going to fire an arrow at the Inquisitor.  This did not worry her; she had seen him dodge such attacks before with ease, so long as he anticipated them, and she knew that he saw the archer, recognized the set to his shoulders to mark his awareness of the field.

She backed herself up, looking for a hole in the fray where she could enter.  And then the blade flashed past her face and an arrow was lodged, thick and solid, in Trevelyan’s chest, just above his heart, and he was falling, falling—

The man behind Cassandra, a wicked axe still in his hands, had one of Trevelyan’s silverite daggers lodged in one eye.

~

“You’re a fool,” she spat.

“Ow,” Trevelyan replied dryly, “there’s an arrow in my chest.”

As if she could not see it, glowing faintly with one of Vivienne’s ladylike hands moving around it, aglow with healing magic.  “You knew the archer was there,” she continued, arms crossed over the eye on her breastplate.  “And yet you did not move.”

“Am I in danger of falling unconscious?” he asked Vivienne.  Cassandra noted Varric lurking nearby with a dangerously intrigued smile on his face, but she blocked him out.

Cassandra addressed Vivienne.  “Is the Inquisitor in danger of dying?”

“Of course not, dear,” Vivienne soothed while Trevelyan scoffed, “he could have multiple wounds and still be safe within my care.”

“Good,” Cassandra said, and sheathed his own dagger in his thigh.

When he was done howling and Varric’s laughter had petered out into some obvious snuffling and snorting, Cassandra looked at him, dead on in his eyes, which were swimming with pain.  “You are the only man capable of saving this world,” she said.  “If you _ever_ pull a stunt like that again, I will do far worse than put an arrow in your chest.”

She stood and walked off, and did not look back.

~

Trevelyan took Sera into his bed.  The elf could talk of very little the next morning, and he rolled his eyes and curtly informed her that it was nothing, just a night, and she laughed and whispered into Iron Bull’s ear and he roared with laughter alongside her.

Cassandra could feel his eyes on her as she curled her hand around her cup of dark tea and drank. She refused to acknowledge him.  The flash of skin at the open neck of his tunic.  How a bruise stood out, even against his dark skin, a mark of lips.

The Inquisitor stood and left the room.  She did not watch him go.

~

While at camp, she could see parts of him he did not show when he walked a trapped road or the stone halls of Skyhold.  Ever since his slip with the archer, she had kept an eye on him, even if it meant watching Sera drip off of him.  He did his best to shrug her off, but Sera seemed beyond understanding the truth.  Some nights she would edge close to him and he would feign sleeplessness to get her to leave him, watching the fire, alone.

“You don’t have to do that,” Cassandra told him one day, across the flames.  He looked up and silently opened the way for her to elaborate.

“Push her away the way you do,” she explained, hoping that anything on her face would be hidden by the flicker and waver of the flames.  “No one would judge you for it.”

“I do not fear judgment,” his voice was bitter.  Then, he hesitated.  “That night,” he started, and she wanted to go away, she didn’t want to hear about _that night_ , but the sincerity in his voice made her listen.

"That night, when we slept, I had a dream that I was standing on a ledge.  Up somewhere very high.  Nowhere farther above me to go, and nothing but an endless fall below me.  The ledge was very small.  Winds pushed me from side to side, and I clung to the edge.  If I gave a single inch--it would be the inch that killed me.  That ended me.  I kept waiting and waiting to be woken up."  He licked his lips, and Cassandra tried hard not to follow the motion.  He looked at her, iron eyes giving way to something softer.  More painful.  "I haven't woken up yet, Seeker.  I don't think I will until this damn war is over with."

“You fight for your own freedom,” she said, and was surprised by the lack of venom in her voice.

“No,” he said, voice as soft as she had ever heard it, “there are other things to fight for.”

She thought of him, burning with his back to the sun, the halo around his dark hair.  The defiant turn of his mouth.  How he called her _Seeker._

There are other things to fight for.

“Why do you trust me so?” she asked him, confusion of months finally leaking out.  “Why tell me these things about you?”

He shrugged.  “When I saw you in the desert, I knew you would save my life.  Just… knew.  I think the best way to keep that going is to give you whatever you want to know.”

She thought about how to respond.  Didn’t.  Couldn’t. 

“I don’t want her in my bed,” he said, and before he could finish the thought—if he intended to finish it any other way—she stood up and wished him good night before disappearing into her tent and letting the canvas flap fall to hide the fire’s glow.

~

“I would gladly let Val Royeaux burn if it meant saving this army, these people,” he spat.  “How many would you allow to die for every piece of shit you paint with gold and hang on your silk walls?”  He picked up a delicate china vase from a small carved stand, all gold filigree, and threw it.  The sound of the pottery breaking on the marble floor made them all flinch, and Trevelyan pointed at the shards.  “How many men have I saved by destroying this?”

Vivienne stared at him.  “You’re mad,” she breathed.

“I’m furious,” he returned, “that you can live in so much splendor, playing as if words wound, and forget that if a man meets a sword on the battlefield, he dies.  The battle is not in here,” he raised his voice to address the cowering nobles, “it is out there, where the demons of the Fade wait to rip every living soul to shreds.  And right now, we are losing that battle.  The only alternative is to abandon Val Royeaux, let them feast on the scraps we leave behind while he fall back to Skyhold.”

The nobles were whispering, murmuring, looking at him suspiciously.

“Sir,” one man said, stepping forward.  A chevalier’s feather was in his mask.  “We will fight for our homes—“

Trevelyan took his blade out, and all talking ceased.  “You will fight?” he asked.  “Then fight.  Or, would you prefer to try and get your guardsmen to do it for you?  Your common men?  Your servants?  You are not the only living things in Val Royeaux.”  He turned to Varric.  “Get it known on the streets that the Inquisition will not protect this city, but safe passage is assured to the South.  No man will be prosecuted for taking what belongs to a richer man in his flight.”

“Inquisitor,” Varric said, and it was hard to gauge his approval or disapproval as he walked out of the room as the nobles watched, shocked and silent.

“You can be alive and without a city,” the Inquisitor said, “or die defending it.  It is not cowardly to want to live.”

Slowly, his words rang around the chamber, and the nobles began to leave, to flee, swallowing their pride like bitter pills.  Vivienne stared at Trevelyan, betrayal on her face.  She slapped him, and he let her.  She stormed out.

Cassandra was alone with him, and the shards on the floor pointed accusing edges at him.

“I have to do it,” he told her, although she did not ask for an explanation.  “It’s only a city.  I need to save as many—as many people as I can.”  She was startled to find him shaking, standing there and looking at the ruin he had made.  “It’s why I’m alive.  While all my brothers died.  I need.  I need to save.  Someone.”  He looked at her, and she met his gaze, evenly.  “I’ve lost too many people,” he said.

She nodded, silent and reassuring, as if she had reached out and held him.  He took strength from it, breathing ragged to keep his composure.  “I wonder if I’m damned for what I’ve done,” he confessed, quickly, all in a rush, “that I’m never going to find peace.”  His hands curled into fists and she wouldn’t be surprised if she found the clawed gauntlets drawing blood from his palms.

She walked softly across the floor to him, shards crunching under her boots.  They were close, so close she could smell the scent of him, oil from polishing his daggers, the smell of horses and the road, feel the power radiating off of him as he stood, damned in the middle of what would soon be a ruin, given freely to be devoured.

“Trevelyan,” she said, and he didn’t look at her.  “Teo.  You are a great man, no matter what you do.  You are something I haven’t seen in a long, long time.  A man willing to give himself for others.  Truly.  Completely.”

His eyes, a single glance, their bodies leaning together.

The window shattered.  The sky was alive with light and color, green and sick and deadly.  Screams were beginning in the streets.

“I was too late.”  His voice fell over her like a breeze, regretful and tired, so _tired_ she could feel the weight on his bones as if it was over her own shoulders, and she remembered the way he looked at her, behind her, on the road, and saw a man with an axe about to crush her skull.

They barely escaped.

The battle followed them.

~

The last time Cassandra Pentaghast spoke to Teo Trevelyan, he was looking at her, blood and sweat making his dark hair cling to the side of his face, and his eyes were dying with power.  He was looking at her, and she heard his voice ringing in her ears, _there are other things to fight for._ The battle was raging on all around them, a storm and a forgotten Maker’s anger.  The sky was alight with the Tear, the central Tear, all burning and endless.

“Seeker,” he said, and she could barely hear him over the din of the battle, “Pentaghast—“ his eyes were melting, soft and metallic and gray like the sun shining through the clouds.

“No,” she said, speaking before she even recognized how she understood.  “No!”

He shook his head.  “I have to.”

“No!  Not after all this!  Not after all that you’ve done, you—“ she choked but continued.  “You deserve better.”

His eyes were so sad.  “No,” he said, echoing her, but his eyes told his lie and he was looking at her, looking at her, “I don’t.”

She stalked towards him, she wanted to lay hands on him, shake him and force him to see reason, and she was spitting curses at him all the while, “You bastard, you can’t do this, I won’t let you sacrifice yourself—I’m supposed to save you--“  she held the front of his leathers in her hands and she wanted to break his nose, break his bones, kiss him, and she was leaning forward--

“Cassandra,” he said.  She tasted her name on his mouth and she was being savage with him, she knew, but he responded like a young boy would, nervous with his first love and she was crying when he pulled away and put one hand against her cheek.  “Cassandra,” he said, and it was an apology.  A door opened and then shut.

“Don’t,” she said, and let her hands drop.

“You saved me,” he said, “a long time ago, you let me be human.  If I just kept bottling it up, keeping it hidden, I would have died a long time ago.  I won’t cheapen you by thanking you.”

 _Thank me by living_ , she wanted to say, but she understood the battle.  She understood what must be done.  She was not a foolish woman.

He nodded at her, and the iron came back in his eyes, dragged there and fought to be kept there, but she had seen within.  Seen the pain and the regret.  “If I find the Maker,” he started, and laughed, shaking his head.  “Shit.  I wouldn’t know where to look.”  He looked at her.  “Well,” he started, lips ghosting into a smile that she felt curl against her skin.  Then he stopped himself, made himself forget the words he was going to say, and he nodded again. Straightened his shoulders.

They were soldiers.  Goodbyes meant nothing.

The Inquisitor walked into the burning green expanse of the Tear.  Cassandra watched him go.

~

The last time Cassandra Pentaghast saw Teo Trevelyan, he was burning, and the sun rising over the Frostbacks crowned him.  Consumed him.  _You fight it,_ she thought, _do not be taken._   But it was an empty plea.  She thought, for a moment, that she heard him scream.

And the fires of the world all went out.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, so when I started writing I was all like, "I'm gonna make a long note explaining all of my attempts to fit rumors and concept art shit into this" but now I'm like, it's midnight and I need to sleep, so.


End file.
